Did OpenAI talk to Rosalind Franklin’s family about co-opting her good name this way? Is that a dumb question when their CEO uses an AI slop avatar of himself in the “style” of a Miyazaki character in spite of Miyazaki calling AI imagery “an insult to life itself”? arstechnica.com/science/2026...

“I am, thank God, curiously detached from all this. 4½ years ago I was minding my own business…when I received a text message…reading simply “Sorry for your loss”…Facebook had changed its name and announced that it was now going to build the Metaverse.” nealstephenson.substack.com/p/my-prodiga...

The 2019 ProPublica TurboTax investigation never gets old

Spoke at a panel at Northeastern last week about careers in information design & visualization. With 10 minutes allotted, it’s not a comprehensive guide to finding your path in life, but I wanted to pose a few questions that might help students focus their search: www.fathom.info/notebook/260...

“Porting Mac OS X to the Nintento Wii” This made my day—first, that there are people out there who do things like this, but second (and more to the point), that he also took the time to document the process in detail. So much to be learned here: bryankeller.github.io/2026/04/08/p...

Just finished; wow, this was *fantastic* (for someone who is very curious about China, tech history, business, supply chain, how things are made, materials and manufacturing, design process and scale, the intersection of politics/policy/business/history, etc etc…)

Fall is the best, but spring in Boston is a close second. Animals re-emerging, plants are blooming, and massive flakes of heavy, wet snow are falling on this fine morn, the seventh of April.

Happy Easter! 🐣 Shotton's site is also worth a visit if you're needing more elegant and clever in your morning (or afternoon, or evening, or…) dshott.co.uk/collections/...

Unintentionally celebrating Apple's 50th anniversary today having just started “Apple in China” which so far is the best retelling of their history I've read in years.

Great thread about the source for Claude Code’s CLI being leaked due to a misconfiguration. Includes analysis of the many ways that the code is a mess. The mess is so extreme that it's essentially its own coding pattern. Much hilarity, starting April Fools' Eve: neuromatch.social/@jonny/11632...

This year, one of my favorite holidays—National Run for Office Day—has landed on the last day of Women's History Month. For any women reading this who have considered public service, take this as your sign to make a first move today. This quiz can help you get started: runforofficeday.com/quiz

One of my absolute favorite parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey… this sardonic reference as HAL is deactivated:

RIP Mac Pro (2006–2026) My first Mac Pro was a Power Computing Power Tower Pro, purchased my senior year in college with every dollar I made during an internship the previous summer. The “world's fastest Mac” in 1996 (by quite a bit), coming in at 200 and 225 MHz…

LLMs are really bad at generating passwords…! I really enjoy these flaws that help explain how LLMs work, because they're so often mistaken for magic. And seeing the flaw is much more convincing than trying to explain that these are just probability machines. www.irregular.com/publications...

“When you have something important to say, it must be shared & institutions need to invest—what’s more important than science?” Yet science doesn’t place any premium on widely communicating its findings to the public, or perhaps even more importantly, its principles. www.statnews.com/2026/03/24/p...

Volkswagen's sales getting destroyed due to competition from China with inexpensive EVs. Instead of closing a plant, they're looking at building missile defense equipment for Israel. Enough layers of scary for our present/future here to make a club sandwich: giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

>wakes up to find ‘I’ have acquired Raytheon, Sainsburys and General Motors >am now at actual war with at least four countries >bank leaving increasingly agitated voicemails >not ideal for an Etsy sticker shop

Still working to get the right marketing message for Rowboat, but in the meantime, lots of updates this month: improved cell editing, map improvements, plus a fresh desktop release: rowboat.net And for the superfans, all the gory details on the release page: docs.rowboat.net/releases/ 💪

Someone asked Christoph Niemann to paint a garage… 💛 www.christophniemann.com/detail/garag...

Q: Why did you decide to devote your life to AI? A: I just saw so much suffering in the world that needed to be automated. theonion.com/the-onions-e...

Nearly every 7 digit number can be found in the first 100M digits of pi. Search for your favorites, or simply bask in the wonders of math and probability: www.benfry.com/pi/ Happy π day!

“The second-system effect (also second-system syndrome) is the tendency for a successful first system (often small and relatively elegant) to be followed by a second system that becomes over-engineered or bloated.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-...

There I fixed it

The NYT style guide

I have a new digital illustraion course live now! If interested - sign up here www.jamesgilleardacademy.com/beginnercourse

This frisky pair of bongos, a critically endangered species of African antelope, is settling into the zoo's Africa area. Meet Banjo and Bentley!

No JavaScript! Hilarious. Love this so much.

[hospital] SURGEON: [lowers mask] I'm sorry, we were unable to separate the art from the artist ME: are they S: yes, they’re still an asshole

Using a great typeface is like cheating at design because your work instantly gets so much better. After years of mucking, we started using MD System in a prototype. Seeing what the tool *could* look like was a huge motivation to finally make it happen. Once we saw it, we couldn't wait to build it.

Rest in Peace, Robert Tinney, the artist behind many of—and the best of—these covers: tinney.net/in-memoriam

This piece was published exactly a year ago, and at the time I /hoped/ it was at least a bit alarmist, but it has proven to be overwhelmingly correct, and perhaps even understated. Well worth reading to understand where we are, where we're headed in the US: www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

Fifteen years later, it's a new version of “if IBM's Watson is so f*ing smart, why can't it fix IBM's stock price?” …but this is even more on-point.

Can't get over how gleefully people use the word “agentic” as if it doesn't sound like a terrible disease. “Millions were sickened by Agentic Flu and thousands more died of the hemorrhagic fever before scientists were able to identify a vaccine candidate…” www.apple.com/newsroom/202...

Always appreciate people who can put numbers in perspective.

“my dream of combining my loves of math, art, and teaching into a book is finally a reality” —@gwenbeads.bsky.social www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...

Happy large boulder the size of a small boulder day for all who celebrate

Beautiful perspective from this map of the world re-oriented using the “Spilhaus” projection, which depicts Earth as a single, connected ocean. From Woods Hole's “Why the Ocean” campaign: www.whoi.edu/campaign/why...

I wrote the speech I *wish* Chuck Schumer would give tonight - as an actual opposition leader. Here it is: "My fellow Americans: At this hour, an unrestrained force of militarized and violent federal officers is carrying out a project of ethnic cleansing in the streets of American cities." 1/14

A reminder that we can expect and must demand so more from political leaders—including moral clarity. I was fortunate to have Ami, a great speechwriter, work with me on several White House speeches. Read what he would have Schumer say in an alternate parallel universe of courage and conviction 🧵

“The bugs are real. The math is not. All estimates are made up. Your frustration, however, is valid.” www.bugsappleloves.com

This is art. The writing style of ChatGPT, recursively explained using that same voice.

21,689 rows of film data (100 MB file!) and filtering by Director instantaneously on hover. All in the browser, no roundtrip to a server. Just insane what we can do here: rowboat.net/f/7vb8dx84 (I'm actually moving slower in the first half to make it less confusing—second half is actual speed.)

Boosting for 1) using bread for infographics and 2) what the costs of running a business actually look like

I really, really like this post from design consultancy Fathom: it’s a thoughtful take on why they’re not planning to incorporate “generative AI” into their practice. www.fathom.info/notebook/260...

An excellent piece by @kayserifserif.place about how we're thinking about Generative AI at @fathom.info, focused on the things we /want/ to build—from the artifacts we produce to the internal culture that makes it happen: www.fathom.info/notebook/260...

While trying to sort out and assemble my own thoughts about generative AI, it's been helpful to take in the work of others who are more articulate about it. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

“You open…an article on some subject you know well… You read & see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories.”

Couple years ago, I had like a one line quote in Wired about Apple's App Store policy hell. After the article got attention, they actually deployed comms people to lie & try to scare the writer into removing the quote. So it's hilarious they can't seem to find aaaanyone to comment on this. 🙈

Holy fuck they actually did it

Scottish gritter truck names are on another level